The study of intellectual history has a penchant for resorting to schools. It is our tendency to group the highest temperature thought into movements, to find it fallen in bunches across the lawn of historical periods, to locate it collecting in masses, as if the probings, suspicions, and sudden insights of individual theorists were varied growths emerging from but one plant per era. We think of schools of thought, and we cut our predecessors to fit the Procrustean bed we have made for them. But it is specific ideas that come from the brains of specific thinkers, and the characterization of thought by periods of shared belief and bias is not only vastly general and vague, but also deceptive and falsifying. No substantive thinking can be so distilled, as no compound can be drawn down to a single element. And thought possesses the compounded complexity of its source—of a living personality. It is an enhancement of inner life, filled and sensed with contradictions, guesses, misdirections, hints, inadvertent gestures, rethinkings, leaps of faith, and intuitions. And when we miss so much, we miss more—we miss what does not fit the character we expect to find. There are often secret traditions of thought that run against the grain of the period in which they occur, and often, they exercise more influence in their eventuality than the dominant view—they accomplish more to direct, to make possible, the future.